Canada's Liberal Government, True to Form

"[It was] irresponsible and unacceptable [that Heritage Canada] conducted no research or background checks before they distributed this money]."

"If the government cannot conduct a simple background check on the institutions they distribute money to, they need to reconsider their use of grants and contributions."

"According to Heritage Canada’s own Departmental Reports, in 2020-21 they employed 194 full-time employees and spent $134,607,209 to promote diversity and inclusion. How is it possible with those resources that they did not see fit to evaluate an organization before deciding to grant it $133,000?"

Shadow Minister for Canadian Heritage, MP John Nater

 

"Regardless of the hate and propaganda he promotes, for years [Marouf] was able to sell himself to the government as a legitimate enterprise, regardless of how absolutely offensive his communications were. This is problematic."

"It is profoundly troubling that this individual was supported and enabled in his hate speech, and the government needs to overhaul whatever problem is in these programs."

Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, director of policy, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies 

Laith Marouf   Photo by Peter McCabe/The Gazette

The man at the centre of this controversy in 2022, Laith Marouf, is a flaming antisemite and all-'round racist. He was the top consultant for the Community Media Advocacy Center (CMAC); in fact its founder and only 'employee'. He was given to referring to Jews as 'bags of human feces' deserving of a 'bullet to the head'. He posted regularly on social media sites such as X, and the quality and quantity of those posts were readily available for viewing in a strictly cursory, casual search. Yet, even though a Liberal MP had flagged the content of these posts to then-Minister of Canadian Heritage Ahmed Hussen, they were dismissed. 

The Community Media Advocacy Center in the six years prior to and including the 2022 revelations, received contracts from the federal government valued at $500 million representing cost support, research and advocacy (for equity and diversity programs) from the Canadian federal broadcasting agency. When the scandal of the absurdity and outrage of the federal government having hired a racist consultant to operate training sessions in anti-racism for government employees led to the contract's withdrawal and attempts to recover the funding given the CMAC, little was heard of this man and his agency again.

Now it has been revealed that he was recently arrested, then released by Lebanon's Military Intelligence Directorate, in an area adjacent to the border with Israel. The restricted area that this took place in was a border town in Lebanon, called Mais al-Jabal. Marouf had evidently failed to present the required media credentials. Held incommunicado under "extensive interrogation" at Lebanon's Defense Ministry's headquarters just outside Beirut, he was released on Tuesday, evidently without charges or conditions. 

 

This man, who was known to refer to Quebecers as 'frogs', Black people as slaves, and characterizing Israelis as 'loud-mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists' who would one day be forced to 'go back to where they came from' had been suspended from X for hateful commentary and advocating violence. He had regularly appeared as a pundit for Iran's Press TV and the Kremlin's Sputnik propaganda platform as a supporter of the Assad regime in Syria. He began his career, in violent 'anti-Zionist' protests at Concordia University decades earlier as the son of a Syrian diplomat in Montreal. 

 

After Justin Trudeau became prime minister in 2015, Marouf's Community Media Advocacy Centre collected some $517,480 in Broadcast Participation Fund grants. Once the uproar over his having been hired as an expert anti-racist, prepared to school federal civil servants in equity and diversity had subsided from the public eye and ear, Heritage Canada which had hired him, saw their officials undergoing workshops on identifying antisemitism, with instructions on identifying racists and antisemites among grant applicants.

 

Marouf had busied himself with pro-Hezbollah 'Free Palestine Television' in Beirut, insisting his FPTV is "unaffiliated with any political party or groups", while relying heavily on interviews with fellow 'anti-Zionists', leading to sympathetic coverage of the problems facing Hezbollah after it decided to join Hamas in its conflict with the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza, post-7 October 2023. Combat videos featuring Hamas, the Mujahideen Brigades and the Al-Qassam (IRGC) Brigades figured large in Marouf's FPTV series.

 

Mais al-Jabal, the border town where Marouf was picked up on Sunday, was a Hezbollah stronghold. The IDF last October destroyed lookout posts and weapons caches and tunnels in the town, mere metres from the Israeli border. On Marouf's arrival in Mais al-Jabal, he was detained at a checkpoint, and informed he lacked authorization to be in the area. Taken to a detention centre, his driver, Hadi Hoteit, a FPTV producer and correspondent for Tehran's Press TV, was released. 

 

View overlooking the Hula Valley and the town of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel.  Alexey Protasov/stock.adobe.com

 

About 20 kilometres from Israel's northernmost city Kiryat Shmona, Mais al-Jabal is in a strategic location, one that Hezbollah used to rain rockets down over the Golan Heights to Jewish communities below. About 22,000 Israelis lived in Kiryat Shmonia before Hezbollah joined Hamas's war on Israel in October 2023. At least fifty percent of the city's buildings had been destroyed by Hezbollah rockets, its population evacuated to temporary safety in central Israel. 

 

Israeli reserve soldiers take part in a military drill in the Golan Heights, northern Israel, May 8, 2024

(photo credit: AYAL MARGOLIN/FLASH90)

 

"[FPTV launched] with the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Flood — the name Hamas and other Palestinian groups have given to the Oct. 7 massacre. The online station is based out of Lebanon, staffed primarily by students, professors and community members."

"FPTV’s goal is to support the resistance from a media standpoint and to incite free peoples to move and fight Zionism and imperialism wherever they exist."

"Knowing that there is a huge gap left in news programming in English that is supportive of resistance and the right to liberation … we decided to bring together our communities here to start a project, a community television station."

FPTV Website 

 

"The Middle East Forum, an American conservative think tank, published a report that FPTV had links to the Lebanon-based group Al-Tajammu. According to Michael Barak, a researcher at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Israel’s Reichmann University, Al-Tajammu is “an international pro-Iranian platform to leverage the resistance axis against the U.S., Israel and their allies”."

"Marouf described the attacks on Al-Tajammu as “frivolous” and accused the Middle East Forum of being a “racist organization”."

National Post